In Memoriam - Fr. Franck Quoëx (Reprint from 2010)

Fr Franck Quoëx passed away on January 2, 2007. He is remembered not only for his important work as a scholar, but, I would dare say, even more for the way his dedication to the liturgy, his example as both a celebrant and a Master of Ceremonies, taught so many people, both clergy and laity, to love the traditional rites of the Church. This was almost the first thing I ever published on NLM after officially coming on board as a writer. 

Today is the third (now seventeenth) anniversary of the death of Fr. Franck Quoëx, a priest of the Diocese of Vaduz in Lichtenstein, and one of the foremost liturgists of our times. I had the great honor to serve alongside Fr. Quoëx at the traditional Masses in Rome for many years, and some of the most beautiful rites I have ever seen were put together and guided by his phenomenal expertise. He had and deserved a reputation throughout Europe as a highly talented Master of Ceremonies; many have remarked that if the Pope should ever decide to do the ancient Papal Mass again, Fr. Quoëx would have been one of the few people who could have arranged it properly. I am always put in mind of him most especially during Holy Week; he had a great love of these most solemn rites of the Church, and the rehearsals he led were filled with interesting asides on the origin and symbolic meaning of the ceremonies. In the year 2000, he was the first master of ceremonies for a Rorate Mass celebrated by His Eminence Alphonse-Maria Cardinal Stickler, at the church of San Pietro in Montorio. Like most of the servers, I had never been involved in a Pontifical Mass before, and we were all extremely nervous; Fr. Quoëx steered us through a magnificent ceremony with grace and calm. In 2005, I was master of ceremonies for a Requiem Mass celebrated on behalf of Pope John Paul II at the FSSP’s former Roman chapel, San Gregorio de’ Muratori; my two very small mistakes were immediately spotted and corrected by Fr. Quoëx. He always behaved with the most perfect courtesy to myself and the other servers, and his criticisms, if I can even call them such, were easy to bear, because they were not born from a lack of charity, or a desire to lord over others. They came, rather, from a profound liturgical piety, and love of the Church’s tradition, even in its smallest details, which permeated his whole life as a priest. His own Masses, whether sung or read, were a lesson to all who saw them in devotion to the sacred liturgy, and he rejoiced to see the growing interest in the Tridentine rite among priests and seminarians in Rome. The Fraternity of Saint Peter’s European seminary, at Wigratzbad in Bavaria, was blessed to have him for some years as a professor. His knowledge of the sacred rites was both practical and theoretical; among his scholarly achievements, his thesis on the virtue of religion in the writings of St. Thomas earned the praise of Cardinal Ratzinger, and he edited and published out of the Sorbonne critical editions of the liturgical codices of the use of Vercelli, in northern Italy.

In May of 2006, Abbé Quoëx was diagnosed with cancer, which took his life less than nine months later. In the final days of his illness, when he had become too weak to celebrate Mass, he would have friends sit at his bedside and read the Mass to him. He passed away at the age of thirty-nine, on January 2, the feast of the Holy Name of Jesus, and is buried in the cemetery of Lausanne, Switzerland, where he had been serving the faithful of the traditional Mass community. The joy of his eternal rest has most surely been increased beyond measure by the promulgation of the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, and the flourishing of the traditional Mass to which he dedicated his all-too-brief life in this world.

From his essay The Mass, Our Treasure:

The legacy of the Lord, the Mass is the Sun of our lives and our treasure. We love it due to the fact that it is substantially and principally of the Lord’s [own] institution. But we love it also as the Church, to which Jesus entrusted its celebration, has transmitted it to us down through the centuries by means of the various liturgical traditions. Because the prayers and rites developed through the centuries in order to explain and manifest before the eyes of the entire Church the unfathomable riches of the essential rite bequeathed by the Lord. ... We cannot in any way forswear a heritage slowly built by the faith of our fathers, their burning devotion, and the theological reflection around the sacrament of the Passion of the Lord. In contact with the Mass of Saint Pius V -- in which we also contemplate the purest masterpiece of Western Civilization, hierarchical as well as sacral -- our souls lift up and our hearts expand, while our minds taste the most authentic Eucharistic doctrine. This is why we wish to understand and love, at all times more, the Traditional Mass, our treasure, and we will not cease to defend and advance it.

Le Baptistere, March 2003; translation courtesy of Rorate Caeli.
Photo courtesy of Orbis Catholicus.

“Liturgical Theology in Thomas Aquinas”: A New Collection of Essays by Fr Franck Quoëx

Fr. Franck Quoëx, a priest of the diocese of Vaduz, Lichtenstein, Savoyard by birth, was one of the foremost liturgists of our times. I had the great honor of serving alongside him at the traditional Masses in Rome for several years, and some of the most beautiful rites I have ever seen were put together and guided by his phenomenal expertise. He had and deserved a reputation throughout Europe as a highly talented Master of Ceremonies; many have remarked that if the Pope should ever decide to do the ancient Papal Mass again, Fr. Quoëx would have been one of the few people who could have arranged it properly. In 2001, he received a doctorate in theology from the Pontifical University of St Thomas (also known as the Angelicum) in Rome, defending a thesis entitled “Le Rite et le Royaume: Culte et histoire du salut selon Thomas d’Aquin” (Rite and Kingdom: The Exterior Acts of Cult [or Worship] and Salvation History according to Saint Thomas Aquinas). He was subsequently professor of liturgy at the FSSP seminary in Wigratzbad, Germany, and continued to write and research on a variety of liturgical topics.

In May of 2006, Abbé Quoëx was diagnosed with cancer, which took his life less than nine months later. In the final days of his illness, when he had become too weak to celebrate Mass, he would have friends sit at his bedside and read the Mass to him. He passed away at the age of thirty-nine, on January 2, the feast of the Holy Name of Jesus, and is buried in the cemetery of Lausanne, Switzerland, where he had been serving the faithful of the traditional Mass community.

We are very pleased to share the news that several articles which he wrote, based on the work which he did in his doctoral thesis, have now been gathered into one volume, and translated into English by Zachary Thomas, under the title “Liturgical Theology in Thomas Aquinas: Sacrifice and Salvation History.” It is now available for pre-order, and is scheduled to be published in hardcover on October 27. (Mr Thomas is one of the writers of the excellent blog Canticum Salomonis, whose work we have shared on NLM many times.)

The description on Amazon: “In this volume, Fr. Quoëx responds to Joseph Ratzinger’s call for a renewed appreciation of liturgical rite. A student of Pierre Gy, OP, he brings to this study of Aquinas’ liturgical theology a rare combination of expert knowledge of liturgical sources and history and the best of modern historical-critical research guided by sound theological judgment. Fr Quoëx frames his study with an overview of the problem of rite in modern theological-anthropological discourse, before turning to Aquinas’ theory of worship in the treatise on the virtue of religion. He then explores Aquinas’ doctrine on the cultic dimensions of the Eucharist and other sacraments in his sacramental theology more broadly, finishing with a close study of the mass commentary of the Tertia Pars.

Although there has been increasing attention to Thomas’ treatment of religion as a virtue, none have approached him from an anthropological angle with a focus on the nature of liturgical rite, or fully exploited the perspectives of liturgical scholarship to shed light on sacramental theology. Quoëx’s work, as the work of a Thomist, liturgist, and medievalist well versed in medieval liturgical development and in the genre of often-allegorical liturgical commentary, opens up this crucial but neglected facet of Aquinas’ theological synthesis. Few books have been published on Aquinas’ liturgical theology. Now that interest in Aquinas’ virtue theory and sacramental theology is growing rapidly, Quoëx’s studies are an invitation to further reflection on the topic of Aquinas's liturgical theology with its manifold ramifications for and connections with other theological topics in his Summa, including his theological anthropology, his soteriology, his treatment of the Old and New Laws, and his account of the virtue of religion in connection with the other virtues.”

I asked Mr Thomas to say something about how the project came about, and he wrote, “One problem that has vexed me since my graduate days is how to discuss the liturgical question with modern people who, even if religious, even if Catholic, have no understanding of what a liturgical rite, or a public sacrifice, is. Every page of the Bible or the Iliad impresses one with the fact that it was weirdly natural for an ancient person, say, whose city had been delivered from a plague, or who wanted to crave a divine favor, to drag an animal up to a temple, slaughter it, and invite his friends to a feast. Public cult was the nexus that held together the ancient city states of Greece and the Kingdom of Israel, as it was for all of Christian history until the modern period. The Sacrifice of Christ and the symbolic rites that surrounded its repetition simply made sense to these people.

Given that the Eucharist is the source and summit of Christian life, and the liturgy that font from which we derive the Christian spirit, it is imperative for Catholics to recover an intimate familiarity and emotional connection to what Aquinas calls the ‘rites of the Christian religion.’ We have to recover, for ourselves, and for our societies, the naturalness of liturgical rite.

Fr. Quoëx’s thesis lends us a helping hand. He explains what Aquinas has to say about religious worship and everything related to it – sacrifices, vows, consecrations, sacred places and persons, the Sunday obligation, etc. He shows us how public worship is a part of the virtue of religion, an auxiliary part of the virtue of justice. It is the way that human beings, both as individuals and as ‘cultic societies,’ express the debt of gratitude and submission they owe to their Creator. Further, Aquinas explains the role of solemnity, of holy things and holy places, in exciting our devotion and directing our attention to the worship of the Father. They are not ‘accidentals’, but an intrinsic part of the way that we worship as beings composed of body and soul. Finally, Fr. Quoëx expounds Aquinas’ views on the symbolism of the liturgical rite, the way the rite can be ‘read,’ like Sacred Scripture, on multiple spiritual levels of interpretation.

The translator hopes this volume will contribute to the recovery of liturgical rite that Ratzinger called for in Spirit of the Liturgy. It also contributes to the growing literature on the public role of religion, expressed recently for example in Scott Hahn and Brandon McGinley’s It is Right and Just.”

Videos of Pontifical Mass with Card. Stickler, 1997

The Youtube channel Caeremoniale Romanum has just uploaded videos of a Pontifical Mass celebrated by His Eminence Alphonse Cardinal Stickler on the feast of St Luke, October 18th, 1997, in the basilica of St Cunibert in Cologne, Germany. The master of ceremonies here is the late Fr Franck Quoëx, whose skill in that role was unrivaled; the assistant priest is Mons. Gilles Wach, superior of the Institute of Christ the King, and I believe the other major and minor ministers also came from the Institute.

This Mass was celebrated less than a decade after the Ecclesia Dei indult was issued. In that era, Pontifical Masses in the old rite were still extremely rare; few bishops knew or cared to remember how to celebrate them. One could hardly imagine that 20 years later, we would see events such as the one we recently highlighted which took place in Louisiana, where a Pontifical Mass is celebrated by the local ordinary, served by local clergy, and the servers are all too young to remember when this was regarded as an impossible or controversial thing to do. Let us remember the enormous debt of gratitude we owe to men like Card. Stickler and Fr Quoëx, who both passed away in 2007, for their tireless support of the traditional liturgy, and their work of many years which ensured that it would not only survive, but flourish.

The first 9:45 of the first video are a montage of photos of the church, of the vestments set up for Mass, of the Cardinal, etc. The ceremony begins with his arrival and donning of the cappa magna outside the church; the vestition at the throne begins around 15:30, and the Mass begins at 21:20. The video stops in the middle of the Gloria in excelsis.

From the rest of the Gloria to the middle of the sermon, which begins at 17:10. The text can be read in German in this pdf of the Una Voce Deutschland bulletin.

The rest of the sermon, which ends at 3:50, to the beginning of the distribution of Holy Communion.

From the distribution of Holy Communion (which takes up almost 20 minutes) to the unvesting of the Cardinal. The German version of the Te Deum, “Grosser Gott, Wir Loben Dich”, is sung at the end.

The last video is very brief, the rest of the Cardinal’s exit from the basilica.

In Memoriam - Fr. Franck Quoëx (Reprint from 2010)

Fr Franck Quoëx passed away on January 2, 2007. He is remembered not only for his important work as a scholar, but, I would dare say, even more for the way his dedication to the liturgy, his example as both a celebrant and a Master of Ceremonies, taught so many people, both clergy and laity, to love the traditional rites of the Church. This was almost the first thing I ever published on NLM after officially coming on board as a writer. 

Today is the third (now ninth) anniversary of the death of Fr. Franck Quoëx, a priest of the Diocese of Vaduz in Lichtenstein, and one of the foremost liturgists of our times. I had the great honor to serve alongside Fr. Quoëx at the traditional Masses in Rome for many years, and some of the most beautiful rites I have ever seen were put together and guided by his phenomenal expertise. He had and deserved a reputation throughout Europe as a highly talented Master of Ceremonies; many have remarked that if the Pope should ever decide to do the ancient Papal Mass again, Fr. Quoëx would have been one of the few people who could have arranged it properly. I am always put in mind of him most especially during Holy Week; he had a great love of these most solemn rites of the Church, and the rehearsals he led were filled with interesting asides on the origin and symbolic meaning of the ceremonies. In the year 2000, he was the first master of ceremonies for a Rorate Mass celebrated by His Eminence Alphonse-Maria Cardinal Stickler, at the church of San Pietro in Montorio. Like most of the servers, I had never been involved in Pontifical Mass before, and we were all extremely nervous; Fr. Quoëx steered us through a magnificent ceremony with grace and calm. In 2005, I was master of ceremonies for a Requiem Mass celebrated on behalf of Pope John Paul II at the F.S.S.P.’s former Roman chapel, San Gregorio de’ Muratori; my two very small mistakes were immediately spotted and corrected by Fr. Quoëx. He always behaved with the most perfect courtesy to myself and the other servers, and his criticisms, if I can even call them such, were easy to bear, because they were not born from a lack of charity, or a desire to lord over others. They came, rather, from a profound liturgical piety, and love of the Church’s tradition, even in its smallest details, which permeated his whole life as a priest. His own Masses, whether sung or read, were a lesson to all who saw them in devotion to the sacred liturgy, and he rejoiced to see the growing interest in the Tridentine rite among priests and seminarians in Rome. The Fraternity of Saint Peter’s European seminary, at Wigratzbad in Bavaria, was blessed to have him for some years as a professor. His knowledge of the sacred rites was both practical and theoretical; among his scholarly achievements, his thesis on the virtue of religion in the writings of St. Thomas earned the praise of Cardinal Ratzinger, and he edited and published out of the Sorbonne critical editions of the liturgical codices of the use of Vercelli, in northern Italy.

In May of 2006, Abbé Quoëx was diagnosed with cancer, which took his life less than nine months later. In the final days of his illness, when he had become too weak to celebrate Mass, he would have friends sit at his bedside and read the Mass to him. He passed away at the age of thirty-nine, on January 2, the feast of the Holy Name of Jesus, and is buried in the cemetery of Lausanne, Switzerland, where he had been serving the faithful of the traditional Mass community. The joy of his eternal rest has most surely been increased beyond measure by the promulgation of the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum, and the flourishing of the traditional Mass to which he dedicated his all-too-brief life in this world.

From his essay The Mass, Our Treasure:

The legacy of the Lord, the Mass is the Sun of our lives and our treasure. We love it due to the fact that it is substantially and principally of the Lord's [own] institution. But we love it also as the Church, to which Jesus entrusted its celebration, has transmitted it to us down through the centuries by means of the various liturgical traditions. Because the prayers and rites developed through the centuries in order to explain and manifest before the eyes of the entire Church the unfathomable riches of the essential rite bequeathed by the Lord. ... We cannot in any way forswear a heritage slowly built by the faith of our fathers, their burning devotion, and the theological reflection around the sacrament of the Passion of the Lord. In contact with the Mass of Saint Pius V -- in which we also contemplate the purest masterpiece of Western Civilization, hierarchical as well as sacral -- our souls lift up and our hearts expand, while our minds taste the most authentic Eucharistic doctrine. This is why we wish to understand and love, at all times more, the Traditional Mass, our treasure, and we will not cease to defend and advance it.

Le Baptistere, March 2003; translation courtesy of Rorate Caeli.
Photo courtesy of Orbis Catholicus.